Total Baseball (1994 Edition)/Total_Baseball_1994_Edition_Creative_Multimedia_1994.iso/dp/0127/01276.txt

Text File | 1994-01-31 | 8KB | 121 lines

$Unique_ID{BAS01276}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Appendix:  The First Great Pitcher}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{
Thorn, John}
$Subject{Pitcher James Creighton pitchers pitching pitched shutout wrist snap}
$Log{
Creighton, James*0015501.scf}

Total Baseball:  Appendixes


The First Great Pitcher

John Thorn


     James Creighton (1841-1862) was famous principally for his exploits on
behalf of the champion Excelsiors of Brooklyn in 1860-62.  He possessed an
unprecedented combination of speed, spin, and command that virtually defined
pitching for all those who followed.  Prior to Creighton, pitchers had been
constrained by the rule that "the ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the
bat."  This meant that (a) the ball had to be delivered underhand, in the
stiff-armed, stiff-wristed manner borrowed from cricket's early days and (b),
in the absence of called strikes, an innovation of 1858, or called balls,
which came into the game six years later, the ball had to be placed at the
batter's pleasure.  The infant game of baseball was designed to display and
reward its most difficult skill, which was neither pitching nor batting, but
fielding.  Until Creighton added an illegal but imperceptible wrist snap to
his swooping low release, the pioneer pitcher and batter were collaborators in
putting the ball in play rather than the mortal adversaries they are today.
     Born to James and Jane Creighton on April 15, 1841, in Manhattan, Jim
grew up in Brooklyn.  By the age of sixteen, his abilities in cricket and
baseball were evident, particularly with the bat.  In 1857, Jim joined the
fledgling Niagara Base Ball Club of Brooklyn, for whom he claimed second base.
At shortstop was George Flanley, another accomplished young player.  In 1859
the Niagaras challenged the Star Club, then the crack junior team.  In the
fifth inning of the game, with the Niagaras trailing badly, their regular
pitcher, Shields, was replaced by Creighton.  Peter O'Brien, captain of the
mighty Atlantics, witnessed this game, and "when Creighton got to work," he
observed, "something new was seen in base ball--a low, swift delivery, the
ball rising from the ground past the shoulder to the catcher.  The Stars soon
saw that they would not be able to cope with such pitching. . . .  [The
Niagara Club afterwards broke up, and] Creighton and Flanley at once joined
the Stars.  The next year he with Flanley joined the Excelsior Club."
     How to explain all this movement?  That old snake in the garden, money.
In the 1860s such restlessness came to be termed revolving; today it would be
called free agency.  According to the sporting press, Creighton was a
high-principled, unassuming youth whose gentlemanly manner and temperate
habits were ideal attributes for the amateur age of baseball; all the same, he
became (at the same time as Flanley) baseball's first professional, through
under-the-table "emoluments" from the Excelsiors, who were hungry to surpass
the rival Atlantics.  Just as he changed the game forever more by breaking the
rule against the wrist snap, so did he assure that skilled baseball players
could never again be content with field exercise followed by noble toasts and
cornucopian banquets.
     In 1860 in twenty match games, Creighton scored 47 runs while being
retired only 56 times.  Not once did he strike out.  He also threw baseball's
first recorded shutout, on November 8.
     But the best was to be saved for last.  After another championship
campaign in 1861, Creighton went through the 1862 season as not only the
game's peerless pitcher but also its top batsmen, being retired only four
times, either in plate appearances or on the basepaths (the statistics of the
time do not permit us to differentiate between these kinds of out).  At the
same time that Creighton was extending the frontier in baseball, cricket
continued to be a source of pleasure and profit for him.  English cricketer
John Lillywhite, in the United States to play a series of exhibition matches,
saw Creighton pitch a baseball and exclaimed, "Why, that man is not bowling,
he is throwing underhand.  It is the best disguised underhand throwing I ever
saw, and might readily be taken for a fair delivery."
     On October 14, 1862, in a match against the tough Unions of Morrisania,
Creighton played the field while Asa Brainard (later to become famous as
pitcher for the undefeated Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869) pitched the first
five innings.  In four trips to the plate, he hit four doubles.  In the sixth
he came in to pitch, and then in the next inning something happened.  John
"Death to Flying Things" Chapman, star outfielder of the Atlantics, later
wrote:  "I was present at the game between the Excelsiors and the Unions of
Morrisania at which Jim Creighton injured himself.  He did it in hitting out a
home run.  When he had crossed the [plate] he turned to George Flanley and
said, 'I must have snapped my belt,' and George said, 'I guess not.'  It
turned out that he had suffered a fatal injury.  Nothing could be done for
him, and baseball met with a severe loss."
     Creighton had swung so mighty a blow--in the manner of the day, with
hands separated on the bat, little or no turn of the wrists, and incredible
torque applied by the twisting motion of the upper body--that he ruptured his
bladder.  After four days of hemorrhaging and agony, Jim Creighton passed away
on October 18, at the age of twenty-one years and six months.
     Creighton's last run home instantly ascended to the realm of myth, giving
baseball its martyred saint.  Obsequies included such syrupy statements as "He
was very modest, and never severe in his criticisms of the play of others.  He
did not care to talk about his own playing, was gentlemanly in his deportment,
and very correct in his habits, and to sum up all, was a model player in our
National Games [understood here not as a typo, but signifying baseball and
cricket].  His death was a loss not only to his club but to the whole base
ball community, which needed such as he as a standard of honorable play and
ability."  Rule-breaking, revolving, sub rosa professionalism, all were now to
be dismissed.  Icon-making was in full production.
     Creighton's Excelsior teammates subscribed toward a fine monument over
his remains, in Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery.  But the Excelsiors were not at
all sure that it was a good thing for baseball to take the blame for
Creighton's death; this might not promote the healthful properties of the new
game.  What if his injury had been sustained a day or two earlier, at a
cricket match?  Jim's talents had carried the game to new heights; in death he
would prove even more useful.  According to a contemporary account, at the
National Association convention of 1862, the Excelsior president, Dr. Jones,
"briefly made allusion to the death of Creighton, and paid high tribute to his
memory; in doing which he availed himself of the opportunity to correct a
misstatement that has found its way into print in reference to his death
being caused by injuries sustained in a baseball match.  This, he said, was
not so; the injury he received in a cricket match."
     In death Creighton's real accomplishments rapidly took on an accretion of
myth, much as his death itself may have.  Baseball, today universally
recognized as a vibrant anachronism, was not always a backward-looking game in
which the plays and players of yore set unsurpassable standards of excellence.
In the 1850s and '60s baseball was new, and strictly a "go ahead" business, in
the watchword of the day.  Creighton's death implanted the game with
nostalgia.  More than twenty years after his passing, veteran observers might
say without fear of challenge that Keefe and Radbourn were fine pitchers,
sure, but they "warn't no Creighton."